
Idea Man
A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft
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Narrated by:
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Sean Runnette
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By:
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Paul Allen
About this listen
By his early 30s, Paul Allen was a world-famous billionaire - and that was just the beginning.
In 2007 and 2008, Time named Paul Allen, the cofounder of Microsoft, one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Since he made his fortune, his impact has been felt in science, technology, business, medicine, sports, music, and philanthropy. His passion, curiosity, and intellectual rigor - combined with the resources to launch and support new initiatives - have literally changed the world.
In 2009 Allen discovered that he had lymphoma, lending urgency to his desire to share his story for the first time. In this classic memoir, Allen explains how he has solved problems, what he's learned from his many endeavors - both the triumphs and the failures - and his compelling vision for the future. He reflects candidly on an extraordinary life.
The book also features previously untold stories about everything from the true origins of Microsoft to Allen's role in the dawn of private space travel (with SpaceShipOne) and in discoveries at the frontiers of brain science. With honesty, humor, and insight, Allen tells the story of a life of ideas made real.
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- The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age
- By: Steve Knopper
- Narrated by: Dan John Miller
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
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For the first time, Appetite for Self-Destruction recounts the story of the precipitous rise and fall of the recording industry over the past three decades, when the incredible success of the CD turned the music business into one of the most glamorous, high-profile industries in the world - and the advent of file sharing brought it to its knees.
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Awesome Book
- By Todd on 08-15-09
By: Steve Knopper
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Autonomy
- The Quest to Build the Driverless Car—and How It Will Reshape Our World
- By: Lawrence D. Burns, Christopher Shulgan
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 11 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In Autonomy, former GM executive and current advisor to the Google Self-Driving Car project Lawrence Burns offers a sweeping history of the race to make the driverless car a reality. In the past decade, Silicon Valley companies like Google, Tesla and Uber have positioned themselves to revolutionize the way we move around by developing driverless vehicles while traditional auto companies like General Motors, Ford, and Daimler have been fighting back by partnering by with new tech start-ups.
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Easy listen, non-technical perspective
- By James S. on 09-14-18
By: Lawrence D. Burns, and others
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Explore/Create
- My Life in Pursuit of New Frontiers, Hidden Worlds, and the Creative Spark
- By: Richard Garriott, David Fisher
- Narrated by: Christopher Grove
- Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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An inventor, adventurer, entrepreneur, collector, and entertainer, and son of legendary scientist-astronaut Owen Garriott, Richard Garriott de Cayeux has been behind some of the most exciting undertakings of our time. A legendary pioneer of the online gaming industry - and a member of every gaming Hall of Fame - Garriott invented the multi-player online game, and coined the term "Avatar" to describe an individual's online character. In this fascinating memoir, Garriott invites listeners on the great adventure that is his life.
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The Modern Day Explorer
- By Elijah on 04-17-17
By: Richard Garriott, and others
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Where Wizards Stay Up Late
- The Origins of the Internet
- By: Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon
- Narrated by: Mark Douglas Nelson
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Twenty-five years ago, it didn't exist. Today, 20 million people worldwide are surfing the Net. Where Wizards Stay Up Late is the exciting story of the pioneers responsible for creating the most talked about, most influential, and most far-reaching communications breakthrough since the invention of the telephone. In the 1960s, when computers where regarded as mere giant calculators, J.C.R. Licklider at MIT saw them as the ultimate communications devices.
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Absolutely fascinating and we'll researched
- By Elsa Braun on 10-01-16
By: Katie Hafner, and others
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Sellout
- How Washington Gave Away America's Technological Soul, and One Man's Fight to Bring It Home
- By: Victoria Bruce
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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American technological prowess used to be unrivaled. But because of globalization, and with the blessing of the US government, once proprietary materials, components, and technologies are increasingly commercialized outside the United States. Nowhere is this more dangerous than in China's monopoly of rare earth elements - materials that are essential for nearly all modern consumer goods, gadgets, and weapons systems.
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Uncovering unsung heroes of modern America
- By Ben DeNardo on 08-24-17
By: Victoria Bruce
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All the Rave
- The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning’s Napster
- By: Joseph Menn
- Narrated by: John Rubinstein
- Length: 13 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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The definitive inside account of the file-sharing revolution that overthrew the music industry, All the Rave reveals the family betrayal, greed, and mismanagement that hijacked one the most fundamental innovations of the Internet era. Named one of the three best books of 2003 by Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc., All the Rave has been out of print until now and unavailable in most formats. Author and veteran technology journalist Joseph Menn also wrote 2010's Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords who are Bringing Down the Internet.
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The Far-reaching Karma of Napster
- By Susie on 04-29-13
By: Joseph Menn
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Double or Nothing
- How Two Friends Risked It All to Buy One of Las Vegas' Legendary Casinos
- By: Tom Breitling, Cal Fussman
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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If Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn had come of age at the end of the 20th century looking for an all-American adventure, they probably would've headed for Vegas. However, they'd have been hard-pressed to go on a wilder ride than the one taken by Tom Breitling and Tim Poster to the top of the famed Golden Nugget Hotel and Casino. Call them the Odds Couple.
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A look at lives of 2 guys who bought casino
- By Eric A, on 01-05-21
By: Tom Breitling, and others
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Group Genius
- The Creative Power of Collaboration
- By: Keith Sawyer
- Narrated by: Jonathan Marosz
- Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In this authoritative and fascinating new audiobook, Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, tears down some of the most popular myths about creativity and erects new principles in their place. He reveals that creativity is always collaborative: even when you're alone. Sawyer's audiobook is filled with compelling stories about the inventions that changed our world.
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Worth reading
- By Glenn on 12-29-10
By: Keith Sawyer
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LEGO
- A Love Story
- By: Jonathan Bender
- Narrated by: Jeremy Gage
- Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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There are 62 LEGO bricks for every person in the world, and at age 30, Jonathan Bender realized that he didn't have a single one of them. While reconsidering his childhood dream of becoming a master model builder for The LEGO Group, he discovers the men and women who are skewing the averages with collections of hundreds of thousands of LEGO bricks. What is it about the ubiquitous, brightly colored toys that makes them so hard for everyone to put down?
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Be careful if you already like Lego
- By Matthew Center on 03-14-11
By: Jonathan Bender
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Lots about early computer development, too
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Masters of Doom
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Before cell phones that fit in the palm of your hand and slim laptops that fit snugly into briefcases, computers were like strange, alien vending machines. They had cryptic switches, punch cards, and pages of encoded output. But in 1975, a young engineering wizard named Steve Wozniak had an idea: What if you combined computer circuitry with a regular typewriter keyboard and a video screen?
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This book is no longer relevant
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Lots about early computer development, too
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Business @ the Speed of Thought
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Gates' Business @ the Speed of Thought is one of audible.com's most popular programs. This is one investment that will pay consistent dividends. Download it for your commute.
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My one start vote reasoning.
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Nvidia is the darling of the age of artificial intelligence: the company’s chips are powering the generative-AI revolution, and demand is insatiable. For all the current interest and attention, however, Nvidia is not of our time. Founded more than three decades ago in a Denny’s in East San Jose, for years it was known primarily in the then-niche world of computer gaming. In fact, the company’s leather-jacketed leader, Jensen Huang, is the longest-serving CEO in an industry marked by near constant turmoil and failure.
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Don’t Buy This Book Be Forewarned
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Never Enough
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Once a barista in a small cafe making $6.50 an hour, Andrew Wilkinson built a business valued at over a billion dollars by the time he was 36—and yet, his path to success was anything but a straight line. In Never Enough, Wilkinson pulls back the curtain on the lives of the ultra-rich, sharing insights into building a successful business that has been called a “Berkshire Hathaway, but for internet companies,” and a surprising first-person account of what it's actually like to become a billionaire.
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Fire Your Ghostwriter
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House of Huawei
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On the coast of southern China, an eccentric entrepreneur spent three decades steadily building an obscure telecom company into one of the world’s most powerful technological empires with hardly anyone noticing. This all changed in December 2018, when the detention of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei Technologies’ female scion, sparked an international hostage standoff, poured fuel on the US-China trade war, and suddenly thrust the mysterious company into the global spotlight.
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Good description of how China understood the critical importance of telecom technology before other countries in the west
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How Not to Be Wrong
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Ellenberg chases mathematical threads through a vast range of time and space, from the everyday to the cosmic, encountering, among other things, baseball, Reaganomics, daring lottery schemes, Voltaire, the replicability crisis in psychology, Italian Renaissance painting, artificial languages, the development of non-Euclidean geometry, the coming obesity apocalypse, Antonin Scalia's views on crime and punishment, the psychology of slime molds, what Facebook can and can't figure out about you, and the existence of God.
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Great book but better in writing
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Lorne
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Over the fifty years that Lorne Michaels has been at the helm of Saturday Night Live, he has become a revered and inimitable presence in the entertainment world. He’s a tastemaker, a mogul, a withholding father figure, a genius spotter of talent, a shrewd businessman, a name-dropper, a raconteur, the inspiration for Dr. Evil, the winner of more than a hundred Emmys—and, essentially, a mystery. Generations of writers and performers have spent their lives trying to figure him out, by turns demonizing and lionizing him.
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Great read but several weird mispronunciations
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The Everything Store
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Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To do so, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now.
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Did you know how bad it is to work for Amazon?
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Gambling Man
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As Wall Street swooned and boomed through the last decade, our livelihoods have—now more than ever—come to rely upon the good sense and risk appetites of a few standout investors. And amidst the BlackRocks, Vanguards, and Berkshire Hathaways stands arguably the most iconoclastic of them all: SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son. In Gambling Man, the first Western biography of Son, the self-professed unicorn hunter, we go behind the scenes of the world’s most monied halls of power in New York, Tokyo, Silicon Valley, Saudi Arabia, and beyond.
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Degenerate Gambler
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Steve Jobs
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Based on more than 40 interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.
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Good Biography, Fine narrator
- By Chris on 10-27-11
By: Walter Isaacson
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The Code
- Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
- By: Margaret O'Mara
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- Unabridged
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Story
Long before Margaret O'Mara became one of our most consequential historians of the American-led digital revolution, she worked in the White House of Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the earliest days of the commercial Internet. There, she saw firsthand how deeply intertwined Silicon Valley was with the federal government - and always had been - and how shallow the common understanding of the secrets of the Valley's success actually was.
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Mostly good, but also irrating
- By Rodney on 12-20-20
By: Margaret O'Mara
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Going Infinite
- The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
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- Unabridged
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Story
When Michael Lewis first met him, Sam Bankman-Fried was the world’s youngest billionaire and crypto’s Gatsby. CEOs, celebrities, and leaders of small countries all vied for his time and cash after he catapulted, practically overnight, onto the Forbes billionaire list. Who was this rumpled guy in cargo shorts and limp white socks, whose eyes twitched across Zoom meetings as he played video games on the side?
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really expected more rigor from Michael Lewis
- By Wowhello on 10-04-23
By: Michael Lewis
What listeners say about Idea Man
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- Jose
- 10-04-15
Good inspirational book.
Paul Allen tell his story of his life before and after Microsoft. it's a very inspirational book that shows not only what to do but what not to do in business and in life.
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- Amadeo
- 05-25-12
The part about Microsoft is good
Any additional comments?
Great account of Microsoft's early years. Too bad it is only a third of the book. The rest is about Allen's other activities, which are not so interesting.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Henry
- 06-21-13
More than just Microsoft
If you could sum up Idea Man in three words, what would they be?
Empathetic, insightful, intriguing
What did you like best about this story?
It was more than just Microsoft. It gave you insight into what seemed like the human side of Microsoft as well as other parts of Paul Allen's life.
If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?
...more than code.
Any additional comments?
A good read to learn about the cofounder of Microsoft and many other companies, foundations, and ideas.
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- LUIS DEPAVIA
- 02-08-25
Engaging, biographical and technical
Describes the mix of technological conditions, skills and opportunity that led to the inception of Microsoft. Paul Allen was certainly on par to Bill Gates. The narrator does a superb job in this audiobook.
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- Dale Sarver
- 08-28-20
great story about Paul allen
this is his auto biography. it starts in his youth ang goes thru his Microsoft years in to his later life. he talks about his investments, his music, meeting celebrities, making and losing money, traveling the world, his illness and his philanthy.
I was impresses by his mind and diversity..
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- Steve
- 06-28-22
Paul seems impressed with himself
I think what you get from this book if you read between the lines is that Paul was no different than any other engineer of the era, but was at the right place at the right time, but didn't have the true ambition that a gates or steve jobs did. But he got rich and cashed out. He fancies himself as something extraordinary from a technology standpoint but was really just a competent engineer.
But he got lucky and got rich... And is quite impressed with himself and how when you have billions of dollars you can buy friends and experiences.
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- Nicholas Newsad
- 12-29-15
A great biography
Some of the most brilliant people keep a low profile, so it was fascinating to get an inside look at Paul's life and career.
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- Dustin
- 12-02-11
Pretty good
This biography was a mixed bag. The parts about Allen's relationship with Bill Gates before Microsoft, and about his time working at Microsoft, were great. It really makes you realize how intergel Microsoft was at the time. They were involved with so much, listening to Allen talk about it was almost like reading Fire In The Valley. It was like hearing a complete early history of personal computers. When Allen finishes talking about Microsoft he gives his take on the computer industry, and it's pretty awesome to hear his perspective on the industry today. I really enjoyed these parts of the book. With that said, the beginning, before Allen meets Gates, and the parts about owning a basketball team and the non-tech investments he made after Microsoft were incredibly boring. I couldn't take it and ended up skipping these chapters. Finally near the end he starts talking about his tech investments. This part wasn't bad, but his involvement with his tech investments are never as interesting as his involvement with Microsoft. It really makes you wonder if he was as passionate about these investments as he was about Microsoft. Overall I'd say if you're into tech like I am then reading this is a no-brainer... you'll just end up skipping the boring parts like me. The parts I mentioned that were interesting are well worth the price tag.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Joe Smith
- 12-03-18
Great Book
This was a great book and Paul Allen was a good man! This book was a good telling of the history of the Personal Computer and Paul's life.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- WireKAT
- 11-01-18
Never knew I had so much in common
Great listen. I liked him before and now I think we were brothers from a different mother.
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